The World Line of the Horizon Star

Some would say I was a lost man in a lost world

There's more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line

August 11th, 2004

Current Mood:

dissociated dissatisfaction

Current Music:

Indigo Girls: "Closer to Fine" (in my head)

Well darkness has a hunger that's insatiable, and lightness has a
call that's hard to hear...

I don't really believe that, actually; I'm just a tad vaguely
disgruntled this morning, and sometimes, it just feels as if
there were some truth to that line. A plethora of small issues have
assembled themselves into a laundry list of irritations and vexations
and I'm feeling frustrated and somewhat down. I feel a need to change
things and fix things, and I'm not sure what to work on first. I'm
feeling disorganized and ineffective. I've got to change more things
than I have been, and get more done, but I am anxious about changing
anything else in my life, seeing what a great friend Change has been to
me lately. I have an idea about each of the things that are
problematical right now, but they all seem to be interlinked and woven
together into a web of nastiness that makes me worry about cutting
individual lines for fear of making larger messes someplace
unanticipated, or brining the whole tenuous Rube Goldberg clockworks
crashing down around my ears.

It was bright and sunny in Livermore this morning, but foggy and
overcast still here in the Bay. I woke up at 5:30 this morning. Either
my alarm clock started ringing about an hour later than I had set it
(unlikely) or I slept through a solid hour of my alarm going off
(disturbing). I don't want to consider that, but I am forced to concede
that that is most likely what happened. Maybe going to bed earlier will
help. I keep telling myself that I'll sack out right after KFOG's Ten
at ten program ends and I finish the dishes, somewhere just after 10:30,
but I haven't been entirely successful in doing this. Last night it was
11:00 when I finally turned in, and even then I woke up at 2:35 for some
oddball unfathomable reason -- I suspect an unremembered dream. Gah, I
haven't been plagued by dreams, good, bad, clean, or dirty, this much in
my life before the ex left. I guess that's not really a complaint, per
se, but it is different, and of course, it's an inconvenience when it
interrupts my sleep.

I'm doing it again. I've got myself pretty well grid-locked. Nothing
is moving fast enough for me. Of course, given the state of my life
earlier this year when I felt like I was attempting to tap-dance on
water to keep from drowning, nobody but myself could believe that I now
find things stagnant and frustrated, but I do.

The printer here is on the fritz. We have an HP 4100 which ran out of
toner and I replaced the cartridge with one that was supposed to be
compatible, but apparently isn't... Of course, pulling the tab out to
release the toner before trying to print with it might have helped, but
I neglected to perform that little operation before hand as I didn't
have any documentation to work from when I replaced the cartridge. Eh
-- feh. I think I killed it, Jim. Our MIS guy is playing with it now.
Some day my prints will come. This is becoming a recurring theme
lately, fleeting frustrations and disheartening disappointments, which
nevertheless pile up, and I think I really need to do something about
it.

I'm up to my eyebrows in work at my day job, but it's not really work
that is motivating me well. I'm also somewhat disturbed by the way we
get things done here, or rather the way we don't get them done as
effectively as I would like, and I'm kind of disappointed with all the
rear-guard remedial actions I have to perform. We need better design,
we need better methods, we need engineers who are not hung up on
stuffing twenty-year old software into state of the art hardware, just
because they had a hand in writing the original crap, and are old dogs
too timid to learn new tricks and fearful of revealing the limits of
their own talents, and they have the ears of too many people with
decision-making power. Sometimes it's lonely being the only software
engineer in a pack of programmers. The company's not getting its
money's worth out of me, but it gets tiring having to do battle for the
privilege of doing my job better. We need a development group which is
not so damned intimidated by the things they do not know and fearful
of...whatever. Feh. I'd like to change some things here, but I'm not
really sure what would be worth the effort, or if it would work, or if I
should bother, seeing as how McGuffin would make the whole issue a moot
point -- if Robert and I can succeed in making McGuffin into something.

Then there's McGuffin. I'm up to my ears in McGuffin, but I'm not
getting enough time to work on it, and not really using the time I do
have really effectively. Our weak spot is in getting the company off
the ground. The technical issues are really just a matter of time, at
this point, although once Robert and I make some progress, we could run
into vexing issues in that arena as well. That would be a problem I
would welcome at this point, because at least it would mean that we are
making progress on that front. We've got to put these company issues to
bed and get moving again. There are some tough decisions coming up,
that really need to be made, and made soon. I need to somehow take
further steps to pull this thing together. It's too much of an
opportunity to let fizzle or flounder. I feel like I'm out of my depth,
which is challenging, in a way, but...gah...I want this thing
so badly, and it makes me anxious about how I'm going about it. I trust
Robert's competence and his vision on this thing, but he has blind
spots, and I'm trying to cover them and patch the holes where his
coverage is weak, but I'm sometimes apprehensive that I'm going to miss
something crucial sooner or later. I'm probably just tormenting myself
with imaginings. Courage, more than anything else, would seem to be the
correct approach here.

On the home front, I am somewhat annoyed with my living conditions. I
have a nice house, but it is terribly disorganized. That's not
something I like to admit, because I'd rather run a tight ship,
especially since it is entirely my fault for how unorganized everything
is right now. I still don't have all my books arranged, and I am still
dithering about permanent locations for various items still homeless
from the move. I don't know. I'm making headway, but I really need to
organize my books and clean out my damnable refrigerator and stop using
the one in the garage. I wonder if I can make a firm plan to wash my
kitchen refrigerator out this weekend, and hook up the water line to it,
and not balk when the time comes to tackle the issue. I think I will.

Of course, my yard comes in for criticism too. I really need to do a
little more trimming, but I've been putting that off, and I need to
start attacking my lawn full of weeds and get some fertilizer/weed
killer and water on the thing. I hope I haven't killed any of the
flowering plants and bushes I want to keep. Perhaps that issue can be
addressed this weekend as well.

I wish that damned lawyer I'm dealing with for the divorce stuff would
just hurry up with whatever she is up to. Crystal and her parasite and
I are living way beyond my means, and it is starting to become very
downright worrisome. It's driving me crazy. There's no sense in this.
What really sticks in my crawl is that the ex knows what she's doing is
totally insane and wrong, and she knows it, but it would
inconvenience her too much to admit it, so she just doesn't give a damn.
Sometimes it sickens me when I wonder how I could ever have gotten
involved with someone who would act like that. So, the lawyer keeps
telling me that we're going to fix things. Well, I am waiting with
bated breath and hemorrhaging greenbacks. I can't keep going this way.
Something's got to give soon. I keep playing phone tag with the lawyer,
and that is annoying as well. I just need to get out from
under this mess, and I have to get that lawyer moving on this while I
still have any money. She's been gone since September and the whole
unfortunate relationship has been officially terminated since April --
for Pete's sake, she's not my wife any damned more -- am I not entitled
to be able to just forget about her? Child support I can understand,
but what the woman is getting is ridiculous, not to mention, not for the
last time, un-fucking-sustainable. Double feh.

I guess no rant would be complete without me bringing in my personal
life for a couple of good kicks as well. I don't really want to go
there, but hey, I'm not much into evasion, and I'm laying out all the
odds and ends of vexation on my brain. I can't leave that one out; it's
one of the persistent insistent imps poking my consciousness with pins.
The truth is, I'll have been a hermit (or as near as damn it to a
hermit) for a year, as of next month. Is that sane? To be truthful, I
don't really know. I guess I'm not lacking for "social interaction,"
but it all sounds so damnably superficial sometimes, because I know that
I'm missing the kind of quality conversation that I really want when I
get tired of filling my house with empty music and the sound of my own
voice. Sometimes, in the quiet, I can hear the voice of that deeper
part of me that wants shared, and is instead, being brushed off by my
brain, in favor of other considerations, and the fact that I've really
not got a lot of options right now. That voice is very persistent, and
sometimes it hurts when I try to ignore it.

The truth be told too, I am a very funny duck. I don't hit it off with
everyone, although I am friendly enough, and sane enough, and
entertaining enough. I guess I just don't let many people in. I can't
really say that I'm lonely, either, because I could always go out, if I
was just wanting company. I just haven't really felt like it.
I don't really know even how to put this so that it makes complete sense
to me. I have so much to do, and somehow more "mingling" does not seem
to be a good tradeoff against getting some necessary work done. It's
also just so often pointless. Maybe I'm just not all that ready,
either. Being single still feels weird to me, when I think
about it, and frustratingly enough, I can't explain that either, and I
don't know why. I just keep thinking that if I went looking for
companionship right now, I'd regret it, and even in cases where I doubt
I'd regret it, it's problematical, and that's disappointing. I don't
know. Perhaps it's better that this particular conundrum goes on the
back burner until I get a few of the other ones worked out. Sometimes
though, I just get to feeling lost, like I have no idea where I am or
where I'm going now that I don't have a wife and family around anymore,
and I want to scrape that feeling out of me, but I really have no idea
how to go about it. It's very vexing. Sometimes I wonder how I ended
up with my wife in the first place, now. It's been so long since...I
don't know...since I've gone out with someone new. I've almost
forgotten what it's like, and that's kind of weird, and daunting.

One time a thing occurred to me
What's real, and what's for sale?
Blew a kiss and tried to take it home

It isn't you, isn't me
Search for things that you can't see
Going blind, out of reach
Somewhere in the Vaseline

Two times and it has rendered me
Punch drunk and without bail
Think I'd be safer all alone
Flies in the Vaseline we are
Sometimes it blows my mind
Keep getting stuck here all the time

You'll see the look and you'll see the lies
You'll eat the lies, and you will.

It isn't you, isn't me
Search for things that you can't see
Going blind, out of reach
Somewhere in the Vaseline.

VaselineStone Temple Pilots

Yeah, I'm in a bit of a funk today. I suppose it will blow over in a
day, more or less. It always does. I need to be a little more
proactive. So, what am I going to do about it? I guess I could dig out
Covey again. I recommend Steven Covey's
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to anyone who asks about
how to get their act together -- that and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and The
Fountainhead. I think those three books have had a bigger impact on
my life than anything else I've ever read. The Seven Habits is a
very good, even entertaining and fascinating read, and some of the man's
ideas, even most of them, make sense to me. His advice for dealing with
life is eminently practical. I think he's onto something. It certainly
helps put things in focus for me. Maybe that's what I need to do right
now: collect my focus. Getting a good night's sleep probably wouldn't
hurt anything, either.

Oooh! Given that kind of response...

I've a good mind to go see if I can work up a good case of pique or a full-bore melancholy, with a side order of angst for tomorrow!

Seriously though, thanks for the kind word. Friends like your charming self are the very best to have. I was having kind of a down day and feeling self-indulgently bummed, and I let a lot of niggling things that have been bothering me lately get me in an ambush. Hearing from you makes me question my sanity for bitching. How can one have a crappy day when one has such wonderful friends? You give such wonderful Hugz 'n' Slugz™, Mary, who cares if you don't do handjobs? *snicker* See? The humor is coming back already!

In addition, reading about poor "Mad Dog's" tribulations really put things into perspective for me (and seriously, thanks for sharing, Footle) I hate being pierced, poked, and sliced by sharp objects, even in the hands of medical professionals! I wish our friend a speedy recovery. One thing LJ is good for, is keeping a healthy perspective on things.

Oh? :D

On the personal front just jot down a 'to do' list. It helps. I know I've been doing that of late for work as well as home. It's amazing how quickly you start crossing off items. Keeps you on track and positive on your progress.

As for work I'm sorry you are crazed. I hate that, but right now I'm doing the tap dance and relishing the thought of some stagnation. However, I know once I'm back to that point whether it be 3 days or 3 weeks I'm going to wish I were busy making the hours pass by quicker again. Funny how we're never satisfied at work.